This story originally appeared in our April 29 print edition.
The Afghan Whigs formed in Cincinnati in 1986.
That year, Ronald Reagan was president. Madonna’s True Blue was the most popular album. Steve Albini’s Big Black released its pulverizing indie rock monolith Atomizer. The Challenger space shuttle disintegrated less than two minutes after liftoff. Cell phones were brick-sized novelties. The internet was still a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye.
A lot has changed over the last 40 years, but The Afghan Whigs remain a spirited rock and roll outfit, one set to release its tenth studio album this August.
Greg Dulli, the band’s enduring frontman, is a wily survivor whose powers of persuasion remain ample even if his hair has gone gray and he’s not as spry (or as mischievous) as he used to be.
And while Dulli hasn’t lived in his hometown since the 1990s, he and his band — which currently includes bassist and fellow founding member John Curley, multi-instrumentalist Rick Nelson, guitarist Christopher Thorn and drummer Bryan Lee Brown — are still synonymous with the Queen City, as Dulli often reminds audiences during live shows: “We’re The Afghan Whigs from Cincinnati, O-hi-o!”
The band is celebrating its 40th anniversary with a 20-date North American tour that stops at Bogart’s May 6.
Attendees can expect a career-spanning set list from a discography that rivals anything heralded during their “alternative revolution” rise to the current day — from 1990 SubPop debut Up in It to the emotionally lacerating 1993 touchstone Gentlemen to 2022’s How Do You Burn?, a dynamic, sonically widescreen effort in a catalog full of them.
Dulli isn’t taking The Afghan Whigs’ continued existence for granted.
“Forty years later, I still get to do the thing I love the most: Writing songs and performing them with my friends all over the world. I truly have to pinch myself,” reads a press release announcing the tour.
“House of I,” the first single from the Whigs’ upcoming album, is sure to grace the set list. It’s a rousing three-minute ride, as Dulli’s husky, ever-soulful voice delivers another Whigs’ awakening amid an evocative drum pattern and Curley’s signature driving bass line: “When the silence meets the sound/Beckoning from underground/You’re invited, there’s no waiting.”
Thorn’s wailing slide guitar heightens things as Dulli reminds us of his provocative nature: “I’m awake, an animal/At the wrong end of your past.”
Speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles, Dulli said he is eager to get back on the road to interact with a dedicated fan base that includes old heads, artists influenced by the Whigs’ conspicuous legacy (like fellow Cincinnati natives The National) and anyone else who’s down for the ride.
“We’re a cult band, so we do things our own way,” Dulli says of the anniversary tour. “There are a couple songs from like 1990 that we still pull out on occasion. It’s exciting — I get to hang out with young me for like three or four minutes. I’m into it. I’m not going to do the Up in It tour or anything like that where we play the entire album, but I’ll snatch a couple from it and let them fly. That part’s fun.”
Dulli fancies himself as a preacher delivering musical sermons to a congregation that has come to expect the unexpected. Even his bandmates aren’t sure what Dulli is going to say or do on stage. He’s as likely to start singing one of his beloved Motown soul classics in between songs as he is to banter about whatever he might have experienced on the way to the gig.
Curley has witnessed Dulli’s antics for more than four decades now — first as a fan of the frontman’s pre-Whigs’ band The Black Republicans, followed by their long-running collaboration as bandmates and friends. He’s also seen their audience remain engaged through good times and bad.
The fact that they never broke through to wider success, as some predicted in their mid-1990s run on Elektra Records, doesn’t faze him even if it can’t help but get a rise from fans who rue their lack of ubiquity.
“The people who love our music really love it, and they’ve stuck with us,” Curley said from his home in Cincinnati. “I’m really thankful for that. We get to go and play our music for people who are coming to hear it and know the words and know the songs. We can do it in a way that’s relatively comfortable and have a good time. I don’t lament that it didn’t go a different way. We feel incredibly fortunate that we can still do this and have been able to do it for so long and still enjoy doing it together.”
Dulli agreed.
“I’ve been playing with John Curley for more than 40 years,” he said. “Our friendship is the main thing. We love each other. We love to play music together. We have always loved to play music together. We’re good at it. We have a great fucking time. Just let life be simple. It’s advantageous for your happiness, you know?”
Which brings us to the latest chapter in the band’s story — a new album with a still-unrevealed title that Dulli believes is as vital as anything they’ve done.
“It’s a Whigs album,” Dulli said when asked what listeners should expect before revealing a curve ball. “John Curley has been experimenting with synthesizers. I’m not telling you that we’re coming back as Daft Punk or anything like that, but it’s felt. When he started unveiling his chops, it was very inspirational. There are rockers, ballads, mid-tempos, sing-alongs. I love the record. I love it so much. It’s the most songs I’ve ever written for a record. I was supposed to turn it in in November (2025), and we were supposed to be touring behind it already. The record should be out, but I didn’t have the 10 that I wanted. I kept on writing until I got it perfect.”
Dulli is a conceptual artist. He has an all-encompassing vision that goes beyond the music and lyrics. It should come as no surprise that he studied filmmaking for a time in the 1980s.
“I’ve tried to be very visual in my songwriting,” he said. “That’s my sound, you know? I see it and hear it at the same time. I wrote my first song when I was 15, and I write songs the exact same way since that day. Obviously, the handheld cassette recorder that I would put my ideas on has turned into my iPhone. I think of a riff or I start playing something. I hum along a melody, then it becomes like phonetic scatting. Then I look to fill the vowel sounds in the syllables that I have, put that into the melody and then the song starts to form. It has not changed in 45 years.”
Christopher Thorn — best known as a founding member of the band Blind Melon in the 1990s and more recently as the owner/operator of Fireside Studio in Joshua Tree, California — joined as the Whigs’ lead guitarist in 2021. The band recorded much of the new record at Fireside.
“Greg is unlike anyone I’ve ever worked with,” Thorn said on the phone from Joshua Tree. “He doesn’t really do demos. He comes into the studio and just starts messing around and soon enough he has a song. He has a gift. He is a great songwriter. He comes up with lyrics almost on the spot. I don’t know how he does it. He has a vision.”
While Dulli continues to conjure the musical vibe in the same way — he often starts with rhythmic patterns before layering melodies and guitar parts — his lyrical approach has evolved. The first-person, psychosexual relationship songs that marked 1992’s Congregation, the aforementioned Gentlemen and 1996’s Black Love have given way to a more abstract approach that started with 1998’s sleeker, less claustrophobic 1965.
“It was probably as a reaction to Congregation and Gentlemen,” Dulli said. “They came a year apart. They’re sort of joined at the hip and very autobiographical. And then Black Love, which was super conceptual and also autobiographical. I started not wanting to do that, and I think 1965 was the first time I was going to do something completely different. That was just kind of like an unhinged party record because we made it down in New Orleans. We were acting out our Rolling Stones fantasies while we were down there. And then the band broke up.”
Ah, the break up.
For those unaware, the official announcement didn’t drop until 2001, but the inevitable was obvious long before that. Curley started a family. Each member, including indispensable original guitarist Rick McCollum, lived in different cities. They were burned out. It was time for a change. Dulli formed The Twilight Singers, which released five stellar albums between 2000 and 2011.
Yet The Afghan Whigs wouldn’t stay down — Curley, Dulli and McCollum eventually reconvened in 2012 for a successful reunion tour. The band’s first album in 16 years, Do to the Beast, surfaced in 2014 — minus McCollum, whose mercurial nature was both a blessing and a sticking point.
The band’s second phase continued with 2017’s In Spades, a smoldering, impressively textured album aided by saxophone, violin, cello, trumpet and trombone. It also featured Dulli’s further dive into abstraction.
“I don’t want to manufacture a personal trauma to write about,” Dulli said.” I want to rely on my imagination. I want to rely on things that I’m listening to and that are influencing me and turning me on. I don’t want this to be all some sort personal catharsis every time I write a fucking song. That’s what I think I meant by abstract — like, ‘Hey, what’s this about?’ I’m like, ‘You tell me.’ I will always have things that happen in my life that I’ll try to work out in a song, and I certainly have on the new record, but I also have songs on there where I’m just sort of chasing fireflies.”
Thorn can’t wait to unveil the new songs and play them live.
“This is one of the best records I’ve ever made,” he says. I’m lucky to be a part of it. It’s a great Afghan Whigs record. Greg and the band are so consistent. Not everybody can do what the Whigs did in terms of taking time off and then coming back as strong as when they left.”
For Dulli, the Whigs’ existence is a blessing at a time when things around them are so chaotic and uncertain — even if what he does in the band is not overtly political.
“We’re in a dangerous time,” he said. “People speaking up and being brave in this time is very important. If the music and the lyrics move you, great. But I’m not built like that. I say things in my own way. I’ve never been like, ‘I’m gonna write a song about that.’ Maybe that’s not my role. In these times, escape is also important. Perhaps that is my role.”
It all goes back to the way music makes you feel. Like Curley, Dulli has no regrets about The Afghan Whigs place in the world.
“Would I like to be bigger and sell more records and have more people come out and play arenas and stuff like that? I don’t know. Maybe that would bum me out. I have no idea. But what I do have is happiness. As you go through life — and you can tell me that I’m full of shit with what I’m about to say right now — but success is happiness and happiness is success. And I am a happy person.”
This article appears in April 29-May 12, 2026.